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KaiserProtoday at 12:36 PM3 repliesview on HN

Revolut has a history of being both halfarsed and shady

in 2018 they turned off basic money laundering detection

in 2019 they used job applicants as free labour to get people to sign up.

in 2023 they didn't freeze accounts they were supposed to when asked by the NCA (the uk's equivalent of the FBI, kinda)

again in 2024 they came bottom in the league table for reported fraud(action fraud). They had 10k reports, ahead of barclays, which at the time had a much large amount of active users.

Again in 2024, they also had the highest push payment fraud reports. now, this _could_ be bad controls, user incompetence, or data leak. it could be argued that they were part of the reason for the rule changes, meaning that banks are now 50/50 liable for this kind of fraud.

Either way, they have a history of being shady/incompetent/bastards. They've also only been a fully licensed bank for ~6 months.


Replies

rawlandtoday at 1:11 PM

That's some background. Thanks.

My speculative mental model so far was was: They fired the dept which was handling those "emails" and did let some agents handle it. Which backfired and seems to fit that history you presented.

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tancoptoday at 3:57 PM

Only one of them is directly harmful to users (the job applicant scheme). Everything else is enabling their own users to break the law only if they want to, and I think that is a good public service.

Of course it might hurt legit users by making other banks treat Revolut as suspicious but im not sure if thats enough to outweigh the positive. Data breaches and cancelation fees, on the other hand...

wasfgwptoday at 1:21 PM

> been a fully licensed bank for ~6 months

They had an EU license in Lithuania for years.

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